NY Times Claims Trump Does Not Care About Re-Election Campaign

The New York Times claimed that President Donald Trump does not care about his re-election campaign or about the policies he would seek to enact during a second term.

“In a recent overarching state-of-the-race briefing in Florida with Brad Parscale, his campaign manager, Mr. Trump was consistently distracted and wanted to discuss other things, according to people familiar with the meeting,” the Times claimed, not citing any on-the-record sources. “When it came to the campaign, his main focus was on his own approval numbers.

The Times also relied on anonymous sources to claim that the president ordered his team to ignore internal polling data.

“After being briefed on a devastating 17-state poll conducted by his campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, Mr. Trump told aides to deny that his internal polling showed him trailing Mr. Biden in many of the states he needs to win, even though he is also trailing in public polls from key states like Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania,” the Times wrote. “And when top-line details of the polling leaked, including numbers showing the president lagging in a cluster of critical Rust Belt states, Mr. Trump instructed aides to say publicly that other data showed him doing well.”

Times reporters Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman also reported that Trump was uninterested in policy conversations about a second presidential term and is instead more focused on sloganeering.

“Unlike nearly every recent modern president who sought re-election, Mr. Trump rarely if ever speaks to aides about what he hopes to accomplish with what would be a hard-won second term; his interest is entirely in the present, and mostly on the crisis of the moment,” they wrote. “He has shown no interest in formulating a new message for his campaign, instead continuing with the winning ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan from his last race and adding that he also wants to ‘keep America great.’”